Understanding Management

This unique volume focuses on management as it is--a complex set of social and symbolic processes--often characterized by considerable ambiguity and paradox. In particular, Understanding Management contains a body of work concerned with building an experience-based grounded description and understanding of the processes of management and managing. The contributors to this volume explore and illuminate various themes including, the dynamics, subtleties, and complexities of managerial life; its informal, as well as formalized features and practices; and the significance of the cultural and symbolic in organizations. Concentrating on the meanings and relationship between managerial talk, thought, and action, the contributors examine issues like culture, myth, ritual, totem, and taboo. Drawing from both new and established anthropological concepts, this volume provides an in-depth analysis that enables the reader to understand the nature of managing. Understanding Management represents a fascinating and invaluable resource for all those studying, teaching, and researching management, and for those in organization theory, organization behavior, the sociology and psychology of organizations, and general management studies.

My background includes undergraduate and Masters degrees in English Literature from the universities of Keele and Leeds , and a further Masters in Organization Development and PhD from what is now Sheffield Hallam University . More recently I was awarded a D.LItt from Durham University . I have held Chairs in Wollongong (NSW), Sunderland . Essex and Durham before moving to York . I also spent 2 years as a Visting Scholar at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.